Community Management

Over the past eight years, I've dealt with thousands of complaints from readers… ranging from the completely baffling the to the hugely helpful. I've noticed a few patterns in what makes the difference between constructive and helpful feedback vs extremely frustrating feedback. The next time you're unhappy with a publisher, here are my suggestions for how to make sure your feedback is heard and acted upon:

Last week I mentioned that one of the many projects we're undertaking before the end of 2014 is what we're calling "The Offbeat Bride Tribe Burndown." It sounds scary, because it is a big deal — but it's actually not as bad as it sounds, I promise. Let's talk about it!

Normally the business side of running the Offbeat Empire blogs lives, well, here on the Offbeat Empire's behind-the-scenes blog. But today on Offbeat Home & Life, Megan did a post about her and my joint decision to ad in-image ads to the site. It felt important to do over there, since it's something we anticipated the reader community would have LOTS of opinions about. And they did… but not the ones I expected.

Offbeat Bride's Facebook page has blasted into the stratosphere this month, with our Like count going from 33k to 43k in the last 30 days. This is basically an average of about 400 new Facebook followers every single day — way above our baseline. Ok, so this is great, right? So many people finding Offbeat Bride and being introduce to the awesomeness, right? So many new readers! So many new eyeballs! Well, yes and no…

About

The Offbeat Empire is a Seattle-based digital publishing company catered to nontraditional types working their way through the traditional passages of life -- creating a home and committing to a partner.

We want to help our one million monthly readers find ways to express their truest, most authentic, badass selves.